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Popular Policing?

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Popular Policing? Popular Policing? Sector Policing and the Reinvention of Police Accountability A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By William John Dixon Department of Law BruneI University Uxbridge Middlesex UB8 3PH 29 April 1999 Abstract Popular Policing? Sector Policing and the Reinvention ofPolice Accountability The aim of this thesis is to explain the change in the debate about police accountability in Britain that took place in the 1980s. In seeking such an explanation in the reinvention of police accountability over this period, a four dimensional analysis of accountability is presented. This is used to examine, in ... turn, the history of polic~ governance in London, the debates about police , , accountability that took place in the -1980s; and the $plications of the growing influence of community policing that culminated in tiie introduction by the < .,. -'.. ,"" ,'~' '....... • Metropolitan Police of a new style':of'se'ct~r' policing'.· A series of questions about whether and how police accountability was reinvented in the 1980s are posed, and the implications of the reconceptualisation that took place are assessed in their historical and theoretical contexts. Use is also made of empirical data drawn from a study of the implementation of sector policing on an inner city police area in North London. It is argued that far-reaching changes took place in the conceptualisation of police accountability during the 1980s on all four of the dimensions identified, and that this reinvention of the relationship between police and people made policing in London neither more democratic nor more consensual. Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Bill Dixon Department of Law BruneI University, Uxbridge UB8 3PH 29 April 1999 1 Contents Abstract I Acknowledgements IV 1. Introduction 1 2. Consent, Coercion and Four Dimensions of 18 Accountability 3. Defming and Defending Operational 71 Independence: Police Accountability in London 1829-1991 4. The State, the Police and Coercive Force: 135 Police Accountability and it Critics in the 1980s 5. Revolution or Reform: The Rise and Fall of 176 Municipal Socialism 6. Reinventing Accountability: The 216 Community Policing Tradition 7. Reinventing Accountability: Elements of 243 Sector Policing 8. Sector Policing: The Holloway Experience 293 9. Conclusion: Towards Popular Policing 347 References 370 .. 11 F or Tania and Alex with love III Acknowledgements That this thesis came to be written at all is almost entirely the fault of Betsy Stanko who detected something in a dissertation on police/community consultative groups that convinced her that an MA should not be the limit of my academic ambitions. Whether she was right remains to be seen. But - right or wrong - lowe Betsy more than I can possibly indicate here. Apart from doing all the things that PhD supervisors are supposed to do, her psychological astuteness in dealing with my endless doubts and vacillations, and her apparently unshakeable confidence that - some day - I would deliver carried me through more crises and more years than I care to remember. Every time I walked in to Betsy's office determined to give up, I walked out again equally determined to carry on. I hope it was worth the trouble. And thank you. I would also like to thank numerous other people at BruneI - teachers, colleagues, fellow students - who have provided support and encouragement since I crossed the University's threshold almost a decade ago. If they ever read this, they will know who they are. Although it is invidious to pick out just two people from so many, Jenny Deiches and Phillip Rawlings deserve special mentions: Jenny for keeping my feet on the ground when they needed to be and Phillip for putting my head in the clouds when it needed to be. Even if they don't know what, or how important, their contributions were, I do. Beyond BruneI, thanks go to all the people in Holloway - police officers, civilian staff, council officers and members of the public - who put up with me during the fieldwork on which part of this thesis is based and took so much time and trouble to explain to me what they were doing and why. Proper thanks for the support - lV both financial and moral - the original study received from the London Borough of Islington and its Police and Crime Prevention Unit are recorded in the preface to the final report on the project (Dixon and Stanko, 1993). On a personal note, I am particularly grateful to Brian Webb in the committee section at Islington Council for giving me access to minutes and other papers relating to the Police Sub-Committee held in the Council's archives. Graham Smith has provided endless encouragement and criticism, an inexplicable enthusiasm for proof-reading on holiday and a shining example of what a late 30- something can do if he puts his mind to it. Georgie Wemyss dragged me out of some gloomy depths - probably without realising she was doing so. In South Africa, Jo-Anne Baker came to my rescue by reprocessing many of these words from paper back on to disk when all soft copies disappeared in a burglary. Thank you Jo-Anne - and sorry about the footnotes. F or more indirect but no less significant contributions to this thesis (whether they agree with it or not) by stimulating my interest in policing, the police and police accountability, lowe an enormous amount to past and present members of Southall Monitoring Group (now The Monitoring Group) and Southall Black Sisters including Raju Bhatt, Bali Gill, Suresh Grover, Kapil Juj, Pragna Patel, and Gita Sahgal. What no one else had to do was live with this thesis and its tortuous progress over the last 7 years. The dubious pleasure of doing so was reserved for Tania Brecker who has put up with it in her own inimitable way. Without her sympathetic brutality, her clarity of thought, and her ability to earn a decent living, this thesis would never have been finished. If she didn't think I always have too much to say I would say more. As it is, just for once, I'll be concise. Thank you for everything. v The final thought is for Alex whose arrival prompted several crises but made me aware of - though unable to agree with - the Fat Controller's opinion (expressed in Thomas in Trouble) that 'It's no good arguing with policemen' . VI 1 Introduction The 1980s was the decade of monetarism, the miners and Margaret Thatcher. It was also the decade of police accountability. 1 No critical dissection of the state of the nation seemed complete without some expatiation on the constitutional status and social role of its most prized asset, the British bobby. As radical conservatism set about demolishing the post-war 'Butskellite' consensus, the police and their governance formed the centrepiece of many an analysis of the 'law and order society' (Hall, 1980)? Other writers - concerned as much with 'demystifying' (Reiner, 1985) the police institution itself as with diagnosing the social ills of Conservative Britain - were producing an extensive specialist literature on police accountability.3 Theoretical criminologists - for whom, hitherto, the issue might have seemed something of a diversion - were also forced to take an interest when two self-styled left realists answered the question, 'What is to be done about law and order?' by calling for democratically accountable policing (Lea and Young, 1984). By the early 1990s, however, interest in police accountability had subsided. The package of proposals for police reform unveiled by the Major government between 1993 and 1995 led to renewed interest in the subject (Home Office, 1993; Sheehy, 1993; Royal Commission, 1993; Home Office, 1995). But, with the odd exception, the terrain on which the debate was taking place was unrecognisable.4 In the 1980s, existing mechanisms of police accountability had been widely assailed as inadequate and undemocratic (Jefferson and Grimshaw, 1984; Spencer, 1985; Lustgarten, 1986), and ambitious plans for a thoroughgoing 1 democratisation of policing put forward (Greater London Council, 1983). But, less than a decade later, critics of the Conservative reform programme were forced to adopt a far more defensive position against what they saw as the centralising tendencies of an overweening state (Reiner and Spencer, 1993). In part this can be attributed to the extent to which successive Conservative governments and their ideological supporters had succeeded in shifting the political agenda on 'law and order' - as on economics, education, and much else - sharply to the right (Downes and Morgan, 1997). With the Labour Party retreating from its radicalism of the early 1980s first into a cautious social democratic realism under Neil Kinnock and then, after a brief interlude, into the neo-conservatism of 'New Labour' under Tony Blair, the political space in which demands for the democratisation of policing had flourished gradually disappeared (Keith and Murji, 1990; Panitch and Leys, 1997). Reinventing police accountability But this was not all because, by the mid 1990s, the very concept of police accountability - what an accountable policing force might look like and who it ought to be accountable to - seemed to have changed. At least part of the explanation for the enormous change that had taken place in 'the contours of public discourse about policing', characterised by the virtual disappearance of police accountability from the political and scholarly agenda, seemed to lie in the way police accountability itself had been reinvented (Loader, 1994: 521). That this had indeed happened was suggested in what was, at least for this writer, a seminal paper by Tony Jefferson, Joe Sim and Sandra Walklate presented to the British Criminology Conference in York in 1991. Sub-titled Accountability, Control and the Social Construction o/the Consumer, the paper's aim was to demonstrate that the criminological project of left realism - 'taking crime seriously' - was 'neither as radical nor realistic as it claim[ ed]' (Jefferson et ai, 1991: 2).
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